Design and development of a Rust-based execution platform for Aggregate Computing

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things has led to the proliferation of computational resources in the physical world, which are now embedded in everyday objects and environments. The Aggregate Computing (AC) has emerged as a promising approach to tackle the complexity of designing and coordinating these systems, by shifting the focus from individual devices to programming the global behavior of whole computational collectives. There are several state-of-the-art implementations of this paradigm, one of them being Scala Fields (ScaFi), which targets the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Concurrently, other implementations have been developed to bring AC also to resource-constrained, “thin” devices that cannot support the JVM, such as FCPP, which is based on the C++ programming language. The Rust Fields (RuFi) project aims to democratize the development of AC applications by exploiting the Rust programming language’s features of performance, safety and expressiveness to provide a minimal functional core for AC that can be used on multiple platforms, including thin devices. In this paper, we will present the design and development of a module for the RuFi framework that will enable the distributed execution of RuFi-based aggregate programs.